Ballet Kelowna Wins 12 Christmas Sweater Contest

The Results are in ... Thank you to all of the Ballet Kelowna fans and friends for your votes.  We couldn't have done it without you!  Congratulations to the Okanagan Roller Derby League for the tough race they ran - they definitely pushed us to jete and spin as hard as we could. 

Here is the official release from Artistech NewMedia:

DOWN TO THE BUZZER, AND THEN SOME.

Move over Kentucky Derby, Artistech's 2009 Christmas Sweater Contest just may have been a more exciting race!

 On Friday, December 11th the team at Artistech released its annual Christmas microsite. This year Artistech launched a contest with the participation of 12 great ‘not-for-profit’ groups. The concept was simple: Artistech would donate $1000 to the organization that could accumulate the most votes by Dec 31st!

The results were phenomenal.  In the short time the contest was open, the small website generated more than 4000 votes and over 9000 visits from across the country and around the world. In fact 12ChristmasSweaters.com received traffic from 70 different nations across the globe. It's really a perfect example of the viral nature of the web and how the internet can be used to promote and draw attention to some great causes. 

In the first couple weeks it was anyone's game. Participants started emailing friends and family or "tweeted" about the contest to all their  Twitter followers. Other organizations made note of the contest in their blogs and through email marketing tools like SwiftSend.

In the end, the race was between Ballet Kelowna and the girls from the Okanagan Roller Derby League. These two fabulous and dedicated groups elbowed and pirouetted right down to the buzzer, which was midnight on New Years Eve.  What resulted was a nail biting wait for us to review the votes from the server and see who was in fact the winner at the very stroke of midnight.

And... Ballet Kelowna was the winner, by only 2 votes! A fabulous showing by some very dedicated people. We look forward to presenting them with their winnings the week of January 11th! As for the Okanagan Roller Derby League, Artistech plans on rewarding their great efforts by sponsoring an event for them in the spring. Watch out for that news too!

All and all, a great Christmas campaign.